Why I Left the Thiel Fellowship for Quora

Re:Why I Left the Thiel Fellowship for Quora by ChuckMcM on Monday March 09, 2015 @03:58PM (#9173553)

You have a couple of assumptions baked into your world view that may not be valid. The most obvious being that people need "sustained periods of solitude and collaboration" to truly learn. I don't know if that assumption is warranted, it seems there are a number of people who learn quite a bit without those things. I could be persuaded to agree that you might maximize the rate at which you learn with those conditions however.

Learning is a lot like exercise in that regard (not surprisingly for similar physiological reasons). Just as walking to and from your cubical to the bus is "exercise", and you do derive a cardie-vascular benefit from it, deconstructing a broken application deployment process and recreating it without the obvious defects is "learning."

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Re:Why I Left the Thiel Fellowship for Quora by dkarapetyan on Monday March 09, 2015 @04:09PM (#9173633)

Those are not assumptions. Historical precedent is on my side and there is no shortage of examples: Feynman, Einstein, Grothendieck, Newton, Pierce, Hamming, Margaret Hamilton, Leslie Lamport, Barbara Liskov, Rich Hickey, and on and on. I think it would be foolish to argue that those individuals have not contributed in significant ways and they have all accomplished those contributions in academic and non-industrial settings. Rich Hickey even has a talk where he explicitly mentions the fact of needing long hours of solitude to think about things.

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